The Venetian Affair

by Helen Macinnes

  Fenner, his eye on his watch (Professor Vaugiroud’s voice, this morning, had been too brisk for unpunctuality), retraced his steps along the Rue Jean-Calas. He pulled the old-fashioned bell, and heard its weak jangle echo its echo, dying, dying into a distant tremor. As he waited, he glanced briefly back to the Place Arouet. The man at the café table was visible from this doorway. He would certainly know Fenner again. But what else had a man to do, who had finished his newspaper and hadn’t armed himself with a book and had chosen to sit at a lonely little café, except look? Yet, Fenner thought, I could have sworn he was dozing like a dog in the sun when I stood at the corner of the square. What brought him back to life?

  One of the doors half-opened. A woman, her short and heavy body covered by a tight black cotton dress, her bare feet thrust into flat-heeled scuffs, looked at him inquiringly from under a dyed, dried fringe of hair.

  “Professor Vaugiroud?” he asked.

  The door stayed at its forty-five degree angle. She was middle-aged, distrustful.

  “He is expecting me. At four o’clock.”

  Her sharp brown eyes studied him.

  “My name is Fenner,” he said clearly. Was his French as difficult to grasp as all that?

  She looked over her shoulder quickly, and she scolded someone. “Get back to your work!” She waited, the lines in her face deepened by her annoyance, and at last she swung the door fully open to let Fenner step inside. The depths of the building encased him in a short but massive tunnel, with an entrance to a staircase on either side. Ahead was a shadowed courtyard with a cluster of old bicycles around a covered well, ivy climbing around dark ground-floor windows, a few scraps of clothing drying on a sagging rope. The woman had closed the door behind him and barred it. She was at his elbow, pointing to the staircase entrance on the left. “One flight up,” she told him, voice brisk but pleasant enough. She noticed that he seemed fascinated by the courtyard. “Everyone except the professor is away—place is empty until the classes start again—my husband—” She looked at the bicycles, shrugged, and said nothing more. She nodded recognition of his thanks, her eyes looking past him into the courtyard, and clopped off in her loose slippers. As he entered the staircase hall, he could hear her voice, changed back into sharp anger as she called to the child who provoked her so much. Then there was only the sound of his footsteps on the elaborate wooden staircase. Above him, from a small crown of window in the ancient roof, the light and heat streamed down.

  A door opened as Fenner reached the first-floor landing. A small man, slight of build, dressed in a neat light-grey suit, cocked his head to one side as his deeply set brown eyes studied the American. “Mr. Fenner? You are punctual.” The voice was precise but melodious. “That way!” Professor Vaugiroud raised his walking stick and pointed. Fenner walked through the small hall, jammed with furniture, toward an open door. Behind him, Professor Vaugiroud snapped a bolt into its socket and followed him with a good attempt at speed in spite of his dragging right leg.

  The room they entered was a surprise. It looked across the Rue Jean-Calas to the sun-baked houses opposite, but here, on the shadowed side of the street, it was cool. It was airy, light. And it was, in comparison with the crowded hall, almost empty. Large, high-ceilinged, bare-floored, it contained only a large table (serving as a desk), three chairs, a couple of practical reading lamps, a telephone, a small radio, and books. Books everywhere, covering the walls, climbing to the carved scrolls of the ceiling. A filing cabinet was tucked into one corner of the room, a narrow bed into another. It was a neat place, with its piles of magazines and newspapers stacked in orderly fashion on the lower bookshelves. Even the clutter on the desk had a certain logic in its arrangement. Professor Vaugiroud was a busy but well-organised man. Perhaps, to be effective, the two attributes had to be closely married.

  He was also an agile man, even with his disabled leg. He had moved quickly to the desk, leaning heavily on his walking stick, and seemed to be absorbed in selecting some papers. He must be almost seventy, Fenner guessed. His hair, thick-thatched, was white and carefully bushed, but one lock insisted on hanging free over his brow. His thin face, with its long nose and strong chin, magnificent eyes, high forehead, gave the impression of alert intelligence and considerable will power.

  “Satisfied?” he asked Fenner, looking up with an abrupt smile. “Does Walter Penneyman’s description fit me?” His English was fluent and accurate, but strongly accented.

  Fenner decided to be equally brusque. “Yes. And here are my credentials.” He searched for the note of introduction in his pocket. Vaugiroud took it, but he seemed more interested in studying the American as Fenner moved over to the near window. Fenner glanced at the desk as he passed it, stood at one side of the opened window, looked down at the end of the Rue Jean-Calas and the beginning of the Place Arouet.

  Fenner was both embarrassed and amused. On the desk there had been three old copies of the New York Chronicle neatly folded back to the drama page. One had a reasonably accurate photograph of Fenner, taken along with other New York critics at the Tony Awards last year. There was also a copy of Who’s Who in the Theatre. Fenner could imagine Carlson saying: “See how easy it is?” (Come to think of it, Carlson might have been the man to interview Vaugiroud. He would have known how to get this conversation started, at least.) I’ll let Vaugiroud make the pace, Fenner thought: he may have decided he doesn’t want to talk with me at all.

  “Something interesting in the Place Arouet?” Vaugiroud asked.

  Fenner shook his head. The café tables were empty. Just as he was about to turn away, he noticed a small tilted mirror fixed on the wall outside the window at his elbow level. He drew a few paces backward and bent his head to see into the mirror. It reflected a stretch of sidewalk in front of the house entrance. “Useful gadget,” he remarked as he watched the man who had sat at the café table now standing below, close to the gateway, facing it. Even as Fenner looked, the man stepped back from the door, stared up at the windows above him, turned abruptly away. Instinctively, Fenner drew aside: the man’s quick glance had seemed a real confrontation. Then he relaxed, remembering he was invisible from down there. The man might be interested in him, but Fenner had seen more of the man than he had seen of Fenner. Fair hair, light-coloured eyes, a strongly boned face with snub features, bluntly handsome, tanned deeply, powerful shoulders under a blue summer shirt. It was a flash impression, yet deeply etched into Fenner’s mind: he wasn’t accustomed to seeing such menace as the man’s eyes had shown in that brief moment.

  Vaugiroud had noticed Fenner’s face, and he was puzzled. “Very useful,” he conceded, and waited.

  “Can you hear the doorbell up here?”

  “Not always. Age has dulled its tongue. You seem worried, Mr. Fenner.”

  “No.” Not worried, just on edge. This morning’s events were still with him, seemingly. He was tired, of course. Last night’s sleep had been broken. When you were tired, everything was exaggerated. In his normal senses, he would never have seen a pair of curious eyes and read menace into them. Had the man actually been talking to someone inside the front doorway? Or was that just imagination, too?

  “But not at ease. I am sorry. If I can entice you away from the limited view offered by that window, I shall offer you this chair. Let me find you a cigarette.” Vaugiroud looked vaguely around like a typical nonsmoker for the small box of dried-up cigarettes that he kept for visitors.

  “I have my own, thanks.” But Fenner took the hint, left the man in the process of crossing the street—good strong shoulders and muscular body, Fenner noted, but below average height—and sat down.

  Vaugiroud laughed unexpectedly. “I had expected to be distrustful of you, Mr. Fenner; not to be distrusted by you.”

  “Far from that, sir,” Fenner said, smiling, forced into an explanation. “I was only puzzled by a man loitering outside.”

  “He followed you here?” Vaugiroud asked quickly.

  “Of course not.”

>   “How pleasant to be able to say ‘Of course not’ with such complete certainty.”

  “Let’s say I am reasonably sure. He was already sitting at a café table on the square when I arrived.”

  “People do sit at café tables.”

  Fenner nodded and lit his cigarette.

  “You think he is watching this house?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “That’s always possible, of course,” Vaugiroud said evenly, but he limped over to the window and looked toward the Place Arouet. “A fair-haired man in a blue shirt?” He frowned. “We shall let him swelter at his table,” he said, and came back to face Fenner. “I have long since ceased to worry about things over which I have no control.”

  “You have no control over your concierge?”

  Vaugiroud eyed him sharply. “I trust Mathilde.” That was final. “Now let us begin. First, I have a few questions.” Politely, but skilfully, he set out to discover some information about Fenner: could a drama critic, dealing with a world of make-believe, be a serious student of international politics? Fenner had often been probed by experts, but Vaugiroud was the master-prober of them all. Why, wondered Fenner in half-amusement, must he be so sure of me in his own mind? What has he to tell me that makes it so important for him to be sure?

  “You must forgive my curiosity, Mr. Fenner,” Vaugiroud said, noticing the look in Fenner’s eyes, “but you have me at a disadvantage. Walter Penneyman no doubt told you something about me, but he had no way of telling me very much about you.”

  “Except that he sent me here.”

  “Trust me, trust my friend?” Vaugiroud seemed amused. “Yet we do not always like the friends of our friends. How far do we trust people if we don’t like them? Or, conversely, trust too blindly if we like them? Human emotions, Mr. Fenner, are scarcely a reliable basis for any accurate judgment.”

  “So I have learned,” Fenner said abruptly. His face tightened, became guarded.

  Vaugiroud sensed he had touched a nerve centre. This was the difficulty in trying to talk with strangers. Even with people you knew, there could be hidden gulfs of experience which you discovered unexpectedly, one foot ready to plunge over just as you caught your balance and took a step to safer ground. “My curiosity was not aroused by any distrust of you,” he said quickly. “I only wondered about your capability for this special job. You see, I cannot talk freely unless I know I am going to be taken seriously. There is an attitude, among some people, of thinking that anything dealing with clandestine politics or conspiracy is—well, either cheaply sensational or comic.”

  “I think I’ve learned something about the hidden face of conspiracy,” Fenner said stiffly. “It has its comic aspects, sure. But I don’t confuse them with reality any more.”

  Vaugiroud had been watching Fenner carefully, listening, sensing. Suddenly he nodded, pulled the desk chair around, sat down, manipulating his damaged leg with skill, managing to hide a grotesque clutch of pain. “I have several facts to give you for Mr. Penneyman. How do you propose to get them into his hands?”

  “He suggested I should cable the main points. In code, of course.”

  Vaugiroud rejected that idea with a shake of the head. “Your code is meant for brevity, not secrecy. This information must be handled, meanwhile, with—shall we say, discretion? Because there are two parts to my information. The first is a report for Mr. Penneyman. The second is an analysis, made on the basis of the facts I discovered for him, which could be of interest to Washington. He has friends there? I thought so. I want him to get this analysis, this memorandum, into official hands. The memorandum is not for him, you understand? It goes far beyond the facts I gathered for the report he wanted.”

  “Have you tried sending this memorandum to Washington through our Embassy here in Paris?”

  “How? I don’t know anyone there personally. Do you think they would send someone to listen to me? Or would he listen to me if he did come? Another—as you would say—another crackpot professor. Might that not be his judgment?” Vaugiroud almost smiled. “It is never easy to gather such information, but it is sometimes still more difficult to communicate it to the proper authorities.”

  Fenner, remembering this morning, could agree. “I know someone at the Embassy—” he stopped. Would Carlson be interested enough to find the proper authorities? “You have two problems of transmission. First, the report for Walt Penneyman; second, the memorandum for Washington. I can deal with the first. I’ll make a breakdown of its main points, and get it over to Penneyman at once.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll try to persuade my friend at the Embassy to send it by diplomatic pouch. You have no objection to letting him see what he is sending?”

  “None. But the memorandum?”

  “It could travel the same way. Provided, of course, it really is urgent. Someone at the Embassy would have to check that, of course.

  “Of course.” Vaugiroud was not too enthusiastic. “But will they send it quickly, or will they spend weeks in verifying my facts? Of what use is a warning of danger if it is not made before the danger arises?”

  “None, except to produce a fine crop of gloom, breast-beating, ashes on the head, and a general state of despondency.” Danger, wondered Fenner: how the hell did anyone analyse danger? Was Vaugiroud one of those crackpot prophets, after all? No, not from what Penneyman had told him.

  And Vaugiroud, as if he could share all Fenner’s mixed emotions, asked quietly, “Do you trust me enough to believe me, Mr. Fenner? That is important, you know. What do you know about my life? Or don’t you?”

  “You were once a professor of Moral Philosophy, and lectured at the Sorbonne.” Fenner glanced at a bookshelf where two volumes had caught his eye: Vaugiroud—Man’s Search for the Divine. “You resigned during the Nazi occupation and”—Fenner glanced at the crippled leg—“became active in the Resistance. At the end of the war, you changed your interests from Moral to Political Philosophy. You are at present working on A Social History of Violence. You also write analytical articles on power politics. You live alone”—Fenner avoided looking at the photograph of Vaugiroud’s wife on the desk: she had died as a hostage during the Nazi occupation, Walt Penneyman had warned him—“and you haven’t left Paris in the last sixteen years.” Fenner hesitated. He had also been warned that Vaugiroud disliked visitors, except his own friends and old pupils, and that he had—from some of those friends and old pupils, now highly placed in their professions—developed one of the best amateur intelligence services in Western Europe. But he thought he could omit that. “That’s about all, I think.”

  “Enough, I suppose. But how meagre one’s life becomes when it is reduced to basic facts.” Vaugiroud shook his head ruefully. “And the last, most complete, reduction is on one’s tombstone: a name, two dates. This man was born, and died. And few ask why.” His voice dropped away; his sharp, intelligent face became a sculptured head brooding over his own grave. Then, very much alive, he quickly picked up from his desk a sheet of paper covered with fine handwriting and a batch of newspaper clippings. “Well, here are the items that Mr. Penneyman would like to see. I have called this report the History of the Planted Lie.”

  Fenner looked sharply at Vaugiroud.

  “Last April, Walter Penneyman came over to Paris. He was worried about the truth or untruth of certain current newspaper stories dealing with our Generals’ Revolt in Algeria and the alleged backing of that revolt by your Central Intelligence Agency. I was interested, too. Why?” Vaugiroud had not yet handed over the report. He waited for the answer.

  Penneyman had been interested in the responsibilities of the press, Fenner knew. But Vaugiroud? “Possibly it’s the same reason that made you change from the study of ethics to power politics. Your experience in the Resistance, perhaps?”

  Vaugiroud was pleased with the answer. “You are half-right. My conversion was a little earlier than that, though. It happened on the day I stood and watched the Nazi tanks roll down the Champs-Ely
sées.” He paused. “I had always a questioning kind of mind. But that day I wept. I had no answers. How could this be happening? How did an enemy break you down before any real war began, so that all your military protections became useless? How did he weaken you, separate you from your friends, divide opinions, destroy your morale and your purpose? I have been trying to find the answers ever since. I gave up my work, my search for the Good, and turned to analysing the Evil.” He looked down at the report he held in his hand. “I have learned several things: without knowing what is menacing us, we cannot protect our safety; in 1940, it was too late for any answer except remorse, and misery, and hidden resistance; in 1935, we could have saved ourselves that agony. For the basic reality of power politics is always this; who is going to control your life—you or your enemy? There is no evasion of that question. If you ignore it, you have lost.”

  Vaugiroud’s voice hardened. “If we were sheep, or pigs, it would scarcely matter who shaped our history. When a sheep, or a pig, can eat and sleep and procreate, it is satisfied. It cannot even imagine tomorrow. But we have more to demand of our lives than that; and more is demanded of us. Unless, of course, we have become two-legged sheep. Or pigs.” He checked his rising anger. “Ah, well—” He shrugged his shoulders. “These are the times that try men’s souls, Mr. Fenner.”

  “And character,” Fenner said quietly.

  Vaugiroud’s eyes, watchful and probing, were suddenly satisfied. “Character—an old-fashioned word nowadays. But still a good one.” He handed over the report for Walt Penneyman.

  It was in French, very closely written, precisely detailed. Fenner read it carefully, condensing, selecting the main points that were the skeleton of the report. In brief, it began with the date of the Generals’ Revolt—April 22, 1961. Within a few hours a story was circulating that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States had instigated and aided the revolt against France. Within a few days the story was printed as uncontrovertible fact in the Roman newspaper Il Paese. Immediately, Pravda, Tass, and Radio Moscow were quoting Il Paese to Europe and the Middle East. By April 27, the London Daily Worker was denouncing America. A non-Communist French newspaper followed suit. So did the other French papers. So did some officials in the French government, who talked cautiously, with shrugs and pursed lips, to foreign journalists. The news was even beginning to be accepted by some friends as well as enemies. The storm was rising to hurricane proportions. Americans protested their innocence, but how do you prove innocence? Even the usually accurate, and conservative, newspaper Le Monde could begin an attack on the CIA with the damning phrase “It now seems established...” But it wasn’t. An Australian newsman, reporting for a British paper, challenged a French official at a public luncheon, and the French government issued a statement that no evidence had been discovered that could support the story. The report became what it always had been, a planted lie.